Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/307

Rh paternity. Notice from this that even the lofty elevation of intellectual man, and exalted yet higher by the force of education, has not been sufficient to change beyond recognition this emotion in its relative condition and quality as it exists among animals.

We cannot separate the mental from the bodily life. When we scan the deeper relation of things in their genesis, there are displayed in closest connection continuity of parts and functions (Maudsley). The maternal emotion exists potentially in the intellection of the healthy adult woman as a natural outcome of the existence of organs and functions which render possible the occasion of its activity. As the time approaches for its full development, any observing physician can perceive the latent emotion assuming shape and direction to a definite end. Numberless cares and solicitudes, colored by the tenderest of anticipations, become dominant in her volition. Not once, but innumerably, has a star over Bethlehem shed its lucid light in the hearts of watchers, and roused from the depths of latent emotions, half stifled with agony, the infinite possibilities of a mother's love. De Quincey, who intellectually stood so near the verge of the impossible in thought, and measured the heights and fathomed the depths of hearts, looked upon this kindling of the maternal emotion, at the supremest moment of a woman's life, with the eyes of a seer. Until I read this,"Suspiria de Profundis." there always seemed an incongruity in the piercing grief of a mother over the death of her new-born. One with whom there was associated not a single earthly emotion, save that of maternity, but who was freshly linked with a hundred pangs, received upon its little, scarcely human face, the most keenly-felt of maternal tears. The reason is plain. The emotion of maternity exceeds reason, transcends imagination, and is brought forth from the depths of organic life as part of the mystery of reproduction. As from the state of eunuchism we gained a knowledge of the sexual origin of certain attributes which distinguish man intellectually, so, from the condition resulting after the operation of spaying in animals, we may obtain additional evidence of the origin of the maternal feeling. Animals so treated have a great aversion for the young of their own species; that which was the maternal instinct in the normal animal becomes an instinctive hatred in the unsexed one. Here it is evident that the presence of organs whose existence is necessary to the completion of function is a prime factor in the creation of an overruling instinct. I have already drawn attention to the great resemblance between the maternal emotion in human beings and the maternal instinct in animals, and it does not seem to be unreasonable to trace both emotion and instinct to a common and physical cause. It is not in the power of a woman, normal psychically and physically, to repress her maternal emotion in the presence of her new-born, and in this respect she is allied to her sister animals. But the analogy here ceases. The